Page 234 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

‘Araby the Blest' 231

upon all bida, or innovations, however harmless, since the days of the Prophet,
shaved their moustaches, and grew their beards long to demonstrate their
contempt for adornment and self-indulgence. One innovation they did not
scorn, however, was the rifle, an exception which reveals rather more about
their shrill insistence upon their unworldliness than they would perhaps have
found comfortable. They called themselves mujahidun, fighters in the holy
war, and when they rode forth on their camels they bore with them green and
black banners inscribed with the shahada, the declaration of faith. They
courted death in battle as martyrs to the cause of Islam. ‘The winds of Paradise
are blowing’, ran one of their war chants. ‘Where are ye who hanker after
Paradise?’ To those who defied them they were merciless in their ferocity,
often putting every male prisoner, regardless of age, to the sword. On more
occasions than one their bloodlust led them to slaughter women and children -
a strange fulfilment of the mission of Ibn Abdul Wahhab and an even grosser
violation of the code of the desert tribes.
The ikhzvan had their blooding as an organized force in Ibn Saud’s inconclu­
sive campaign against the Rashidis in 1918, when they failed to distinguish
themselves to any appreciable degree. They had more success the following
year when they prevented the forces of Sharif Husain of the Hijaz under the
command of his son, Abdullah (later the amir of Transjordan), from reassert­
ing Hashimite authority over the oasis town of Khurma, which lay in the
undefined and disputed borderland between the Hijaz and the Qasim. There­
after the town, many of whose inhabitants, including the former Hashimite
governor, had embraced Wahhabism, remained a Saudi outpost on the edge of
the Hijaz, the tip of a dagger aimed at the vitals of the Hashimite kingdom.
Ikhwan contingents rode with Ibn Saud’s forces to the conquest of the northern
Asir - the coastal region to the south of the Hijaz - in 1920. In the autumn of

that year a large ikhwan force under Faisal ibn Sultan al-Dawish, the para­
mount chieftain of the Mutair, attacked Kuwait. It was repulsed in a bloody
engagement at Jahra, a few miles from Kuwait town, early in October, in
which some 200 Kuwaitis and 1,200 ikhwan were slain.
The attack on Kuwait arose from the Kuwaitis’ objection to the establish­
ment of a hijra by Mutairi ikhwan in territory which the Kuwaitis regarded as
rightfully theirs. It lay within the frontiers assigned to Kuwait in the unratified
Anglo-Ottoman convention of July 1913, frontiers which Ibn Saud refused to
accept - if he even knew of their existence. The need to define the northern
limits of Ibn Saud’s territories became more pressing a year after the ikhwan
attack on Kuwait, when Ibn Saud finally overthrew the Rashidi dynasty of Hail
and annexed the principality of Jabal Shammar. This latest conquest removed
the barrier which Jabal Shammar had interposed between the Saudi domains
and the newly created British mandates of Iraq and Transjordan, exposing the
southern flanks of these two territories to ikhwan marauding. Almost immedi­
ately after the fall of Hail the ikhwan began raiding the tribes of lower Iraq. Sir